For more than three decades, the members of Yo La Tengo have remained fixtures on the independent music scene—and not merely in the euphemistic sense that they have continued to tour and put out albums. Formed by guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley in 1984, and joined by James McNew in 1991, all three remain spottable at New York area venues small and smaller, catching a range of avant-jazz, guitar pickers, comedians, and even occasionally old-fashioned indie rock. Their tastes are as varied as one might expect for a band that evolved from a Kinks-loving rock trio to an eclectic instrument-switching institution that jumps happily between gentle folk, atmospheric jams, drum-machine experiments, guitar freak-outs, R&B, and open-hearted ballads.

Kaplan was barely out of his teens when he became a music journalist in New York’s roiling late-’70s underground scene. He met Hubley, a visual artist and fellow music obsessive, at a Feelies show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken in 1980. The beloved, now-closed venue became the band’s homebase, where Kaplan would soon mix sound, Hubley would DJ, and Yo La Tengo would play its first show. (It’s also where Kaplan and Hubley held their wedding reception in 1987.) Nearly a decade after their first attempts at starting a band, the pair found their perfect creative partner in McNew, an equally curious listener and former zine editor whose sense of humor and low-key demeanor filled out Yo La Tengo as much as his harmonies and inventive musicianship.

Kaplan, 61, Hubley, 58, and McNew, 48, still convene at their Hoboken, New Jersey practice space more days than not, and it was there that they half-accidentally recorded their typically ranging and atypically dense new album, There’s a Riot Going On. Assembled and augmented by McNew from a trove of experiments and works-in-progress, the Sly and the Family Stone-referencing record represents yet another new method of making music for the band. Pushing forward as a matter of course, Yo La Tengo’s existence is a conversation that flows almost effortlessly between music making and three parallel lifetimes of absolute fandom.

Running through some of the music that has marked their lives is an unsurprisingly discursive adventure that includes mixtapes, singles, cover songs, shows attended (together and separately), shared memories, and good barbecue. At one point, Kaplan mentions a song Hubley doesn’t remember, and sings a few bars before McNew interrupts. “We’ll do it at practice later,” he says. And they probably will.

Georgia Hubley: Growing up in the ’60s, my sister and I listened to the Broadway record of Young Abe Lincoln a lot.I remember poring over the pictures and being scared—maybe because people in the musical died. One song called “I Want to Be a Little Frog in a Little Pond” was definitely the winner. Weirdly, someone involved in the production ended up being up part of “Sesame Street,” which I have a connection to through my parents [animators Faith and John Hubley].

Ira Kaplan: Although I already had albums of my own, 1967 was an earth-shattering year for me. We had the radio on all the time, but it was most often tuned to WQXR, playing classical music, which was genuinely worse than not having the radio on at all.

When I was 10, for reasons that were never explained to me, I was allowed to start listening to AM radio and was given a transistor radio. That’s also the year I began buying singles and listening to WABC. I kept track of that station’s yearly top 100 countdown—but it wasn’t in order. For a week, they would play records from all over the list, and you had to keep your own chart. And the Music Explosion’s “Little Bit O’ Soul” was on that chart.

My family lived on a little road [in Croton-on-Hudson, New York] with just a few families, and the guy at the end of the street worked for Columbia or CBS Records. So, when I was maybe 12, they filmed a video for Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” I think, in his backyard, and the local kids were invited to come hang out. But of course Sly was late. Hours and hours late. So we gave up. Fuck it!

Georgia Hubley: When [There’s a Riot Goin’ On]came out in 1971, “Family Affair” was my favorite. I, too, was a big countdown person, and whenever that song came on, I would be so excited. It has that bubbly beginning, but DJs were always talking over it. I remember being, like, “Shut up! I want to hear the whole thing!”

James McNew: By 15, I was fiercely autonomous in my record collecting and listening and reading and general discovery. At that point, Damaged by Black Flag had great sway over me and to this day it still does. I probably saw [their logo] on somebody’s jacket; I was definitely reading about them. I didn’t know about the college radio station yet, I was probably afraid of it. But I knew about Creem magazine, because I could buy it at the 7-11. They’d have sweet pictures of David Lee Roth on the front, but then somewhere in the middle would be something about Black Flag or Pere Ubu.

Black Flag were a natural extension of my childhood love of hard rock. This is great! It’s really fast! There are crazy parts! And everybody’s yelling! My ninth grade English teacher was married to someone who wrote for Creem, and she lent me [the Velvet Underground’s] White Light/White Heat and [Lenny Kaye’s garage rock compilation] Nuggets. After I discovered that direction, I tanked every class.

Ira Kaplan: When I was in high school, the local rock band that I idolized did almost exclusively cover songs, including a few songs that I found out were by NRBQ. That was my first introduction to them. When I first heard NRBQ’s actual records, I remember thinking, “Eh, they’re OK.” But when I went to see them live, I was completely in love. I subsequently saw them as many times as I could.

So in ’77, when I was 20, they put out All Hopped Up, and that became the first record I reviewed for the SoHo News. I’d been waiting for that record to come out for so long that I’d already made my own record in my head, like what songs should be on a NRBQ record. They did so much stuff live that wasn’t from their records. Looking back, I now know that they were saving some songs for what they hoped would be a major label deal. That’s why there were a few discrepancies between All Hopped Up and the version in my head. But I loved that record. It remains one of their best.

Georgia Hubley: I had never liked Bob Dylan, except for Nashville Skyline. But then [dB’s drummer] Will Rigby made us a tape of Dylan bootlegs, and I listened to that a lot for a few years. “She’s Your Lover Now” was my favorite. And there was another little fragment on there—I love that about tapes, when things just cut off and go to something else. So it was just a couple of bars, and he sings one line and it’s over. At some point recently I tried to figure out which one it was and couldn’t. But I just loved that little fragment.

Ira Kaplan: At some point in 1987, I went on tour with [politically-minded no wave descendents] Mofungo. It was a weeklong tour in a motorhome, and I was their soundman. That was the period when [guitarist] Elliott Sharp was in the band, but he didn’t go on the tour, so I was pressed into a second-level guitar role too. The sound didn’t get any worse when I wasn’t doing it, so I would just join them for a half-dozen songs at some point. That was the year End of the World, Part 2 came out, and I’m sure I was listening to that, especially because I had to study my parts.

James McNew: Fantastic Damage was El-P’s first solo album. That record. Completely. Destroyed. My. Mind. I didn’t expect to be able to relate to it as closely as I did. It’s a really psychedelic record—dark and weird and super paranoid and also hilarious and really personal. It’s a headful of a record, and it still works every time I listen to it. It’s like one of those 3D puzzles where, if you stare at it long enough, a pony pops out at you.

Ira Kaplan: [New Zealand indie rock band] the Clean’s Compilation cassette completely blew our minds when we got it in the late ’80s. I remember coming back from from our booking agency when we were about to go on tour in Europe, and saying to Georgia, “Guess who we’re going to miss while we’re gone?” Georgia saw how despondent I looked and guessed it was the Velvet Underground—that’s how much we loved the Clean.

James McNew:I wasn’t in the band at that point and I actually saw that Clean show with Chris Knox [of New Zealand duo the Tall Dwarfs] in New York. That was overwhelming. It was like seeing the Easter Bunny. Like, Wow, you’re real, I can’t believe it.

Ira Kaplan:As it happened, we did end up seeing the Clean on that European tour, and that’s where we met them. We knew them casually after that, but in ’97 [Clean guitarist] David Kilgour put out an album called David Kilgour & the Heavy Eights and went on tour with us with his brother [and Clean drummer] Hamish, and Lisa Siegel. David and Hamish would play with us a lot, and we got to do a lot of Clean songs. We got to hear David’s song “Seemingly Stranded” every night—everyone’s gotta have one greatest song, and that could be his.

James McNew: In 2014, I was listening to the San Francisco double shot of the Residents and the Grateful Dead in equally massive doses, which took me to some pretty great places. With the Residents, it definitely began with a re-awareness of Commercial Album. That might’ve been the first CD I ever bought. It seemed like a very practical application of a compact disc, because there were 50 songs and they were all one-minute long; I was never going to cue up just song 32 on Commercial Album. But the CD was like a total solution to a problem. And then, when I was 45, I just remembered there were 50 catchy one-minute songs to re-explore, and went back to it listened again and loved it so much. The songs are so beautiful and scary and then, in a minute, they’re gone.

Ira Kaplan: I have double regrets involving Sam Rivers. I remember riding into New York on the train from Croton, and I saw a guy who I didn’t know that well. He was telling me how he’d gotten into the loft jazz scene in New York, which I knew very little about. I know he was talking about Sam Rivers, but by the time we got toManhattan, I’d forgotten the name Sam Rivers.

Well after that, Georgia and I went to see the Sam Rivers Trio at Sweet Basil and it was just remarkable. One guy played drums, one guy played bass, Sam Rivers played horns, but they all played piano. Every song, maybe, was a different configuration. We walked out of there asking why we hadn’t gone with Georgia’s mom, who loved jazz, and who would’ve responded to everything in that show. We never had the chance again, and that feeling of regret has never quite gone away.

In 2007, the year I turned 50, we did a show in Orlando and got Sam Rivers to open the show, which was really exciting. He didn’t exactly play the way he might’ve if I had written the setlist; he did a seemingly funkier set to, I guess, try to appeal to the rock crowd. It was still great, but it didn’t have the perfection of that trio show we saw.

Georgia Hubley: I’d never put any time into Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk but I decided to a few years ago, when I went for a little drive through northern California on my own. I was in San Francisco and I went down through Big Sur and met Ira in L.A. I just listened to that record and a lot of the outtakes, and the song “That’s All for Everyone” was the one I kept gravitating towards.

Ira Kaplan: I’m sure all three of us have had the experience of people coming up to us and saying, “I’m your biggest fan,” and it’s like, “Well, we genuinely appreciate everybody who likes our band, but you may not be our biggest fan.” That said, I think Georgia and I combined have a pretty good claim on being [dB’s drummer and songwriter] Will Rigby’s biggest fan.

Last year, I turned 60, and Georgia and I had our 30th wedding anniversary, so we threw a party and asked Will Rigby—who’d performed when we got married—to play, which he did. He’s just the greatest. We put out his first solo album, Sidekick Phenomenon on Egon [in 1985], which is a great record, but it’s not as great as Paradoxaholic, his second record. I could listen to that record every day, and it was nice to be reminded of his greatness on that day.